Gillian Wearing has rejuvenated the tradition of portraiture for the modern
world, finds Alastair Sooke at the Whitechapel Gallery.

Gillian Wearing's Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say, 1992-3 (HELP and I'M DESPERATE, details)Photo: Gillian Wearing / Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

The trouble with Damien Hirst is that he attracts so much attention, like a black hole devouring light. This week, a survey of his career opens at the Tate. Amid all the tedious hoopla over whether or not a pickled shark counts as a work of art, spare a thought for another member of the YBAs: Gillian Wearing, who has a retrospective of her own at the Whitechapel Gallery.

While Hirst makes brash, ballsy statements about money and death, Wearing, who was a year behind him at Goldsmiths College, produces art with a subtler flavour. Since graduating in 1990, she has worked firmly within the tradition of portraiture, rejuvenating the genre for the modern world.

The first piece in the exhibition is Dancing in Peckham, an early video work from 1994. A kind of self-portrait, it presents Wearing dancing for 25 minutes in a shopping arcade in south London. She looks as if she’s auditioning for one of those iPod adverts featuring silhouetted dancers, though the film predates MP3 players by almost a decade.

Sometimes her moves are sexy and slinky. Occasionally, she grooves like an embarrassing dad, all chicken wings and thrash-metal air-guitar. The strange thing, though, is that there isn’t any music: as she jives and spins to a soundtrack in her imagination, all we hear is the pitter-patter of passing shoppers. Since her extraordinary behaviour is at odds with the everyday setting, we are invited to reflect on the discrepancy between what goes on inside our heads and how we usually present ourselves in public.

For 20 years, Wearing, who won the Turner Prize in 1997, has developed this theme. In a celebrated series of films including Confess All On Video (1994), Trauma (2000), and Secrets and Lies (2009), she invites people to reveal outlandish secrets while wearing latex masks. The effect is paradoxical. Wearing doesn’t offer a literal likeness of her subjects, since their appearance is disguised. But her films still function like pin-sharp portraiture, because the sense of character that emerges feels unvarnished and true. Wearing suggests that the face we present to the world has a mask-like quality. By confronting this head-on, she captures the psychology behind the public persona. Artifice yields authenticity.

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Wearing’s art can be heartrending. I was especially touched by Prelude (2000), a short black-and-white film, indebted to the Screen Tests of Andy Warhol, in which we watch a spirited “street drinker” called Lindsey in close-up, as she laughs, frowns, and swigs from a can of Tennent’s, a fag behind one ear. In a voiceover, her twin sister reveals that, less than two weeks after the footage was shot, Lindsey died of pneumonia and cirrhosis of the liver. We hear about her “cold, heartless” funeral, and that her mother never loved her. As the twin’s narrative closes (“I feel a part of me is missing now. Nothing, nothing will stop me of thinking of her.”), we see Lindsey’s face lit up by an enormous grin. Suddenly, the grin disappears, in a chilling reminder of the passage from life to death.

It’s a simple moment, but it cuts to the quick. Unlike the portraiture of the past, which commemorates the wealthy and powerful, here is an eloquent memorial to someone on the fringes of society. Prelude has a degree of humanity and sophistication Hirst rarely, if ever, musters.